Initial coin offerings (ICOs): Why do they succeed?

Recent literature has addressed initial coin offering (ICO) projects, which are an innovative form of venture financing through cryptocurrencies using blockchain technology. Many features of ICOs remain unexplored, leaving much room for additional research, including the success factors of ICO projects. We investigate the success of ICO projects, with our main purpose being to identify factors that influence a project’s outcome. Following a literature review, from which several potential variables were collected, we used a database comprising 428 ICO projects in the banking/financial sector to regress several econometric models. We confirmed the impacts of several variables and obtained particularly valuable results concerning project and campaign variables. We confirmed the importance of a well-structured and informative whitepaper. The proximity to certain markets with high availability of financial and human capital is also an important determinant of the success of an ICO. We also confirm the strong dependency on cryptocurrency and the impact of cryptocurrency valuations on the success of a project. Furthermore, we confirm the importance of social media in ICO projects, as well as the importance of human capital characteristics. Our research contributes to the ICO literature by capturing most of the success factors previously identified and testing their impacts based on a large database. The current research contributes to the building of systems theory and signaling theory by adapting their frameworks to the ICO environment. Our results are also important for regulators, as ICOs are mainly unregulated and have vast future potential, and for investors, who can benefit from our analysis and use it in their due diligence.

The Future Potential of Biosensors to Investigate the Gut-Brain Axis

The multifaceted and heterogeneous nature of depression presents challenges in pinpointing treatments. Among these contributions are the interconnections between the gut microbiome and neurological function termed the gut-brain axis. A diverse range of microbiome-produced metabolites interact with host signaling and metabolic pathways through this gut-brain axis relationship. Therefore, biosensor detection of gut metabolites offers the potential to quantify the microbiome’s contributions to depression. Herein we review synthetic biology strategies to detect signals that indicate gut-brain axis dysregulation that may contribute to depression. We also highlight future challenges in developing living diagnostics of microbiome conditions influencing depression.

VIGE: virus-induced genome editing for improving abiotic and biotic stress traits in plants

Agricultural production is hampered by disease, pests, and environmental stresses. To minimize yield loss, it is important to develop crop cultivars with resistance or tolerance to their respective biotic and abiotic constraints. Transformation techniques are not optimized for many species and desirable cultivars may not be amenable to genetic transformation, necessitating inferior cultivar usage and time-consuming introgression through backcrossing to the preferred variety. Overcoming these limitations will greatly facilitate the development of disease, insect, and abiotic stress tolerant crops. One such avenue for rapid crop improvement is the development of viral systems to deliver CRISPR/Cas-based genome editing technology to plants to generate targeted beneficial mutations. Viral delivery of genomic editing constructs can theoretically be applied to span the entire host range of the virus utilized, circumventing the challenges associated with traditional transformation and breeding techniques. Here we explore the types of viruses that have been optimized for CRISPR/Cas9 delivery, the phenotypic outcomes achieved in recent studies, and discuss the future potential of this rapidly advancing technology.

The Expectations of Project Managers from Artificial Intelligence: A Delphi Study

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are rapidly developing these days and are expected to impact the field of project management on multiple levels; however, there remains a high level of uncertainty regarding the effect that AI might have on project management practices. This article aims to address this topic based on a Delphi study with a panel of 52 project management experts who reflected on future potential AI applications for the project management Knowledge Areas. The article provides a visionary perspective that can be further translated into practical solutions in the near and far future to improve project management practices.

Sustainable Fourth Industrial Revolution

The sustainable revolution constitutes a multiscalar process characterized by gradual interconnection and digitization in economic globalization. This work confronts the discourses derived from this socioeconomic process with the biophysical limits of the planet through the analysis of the material requirements of the basic infrastructure necessary for the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Through the study of the discourses and the current situation of natural resources, 13 metals have been identified whose availability in the next 30 years constitutes the limiting factors for the effective deployment of the technologies of this process. In this situation, the theoretical foundations of future potential are established where techno-optimistic and degrowth discourses coexist through uneven development, making sustainability a characteristic based on exclusivity.

Artificial Intelligence and Optimisation Techniques for Risk Reduction in Civil Engineering

Artificial intelligence techniques are at the centre of a major shift in business today. They have a very broad array of applications within businesses, including that of optimisation for risk reduction in civil engineering projects. This is an active area of research, which has started to see real-world applications over the last few decades. It is still hindered by the extreme complexity of civil engineering problems and the computing power necessary to tackle these, but the economic and other benefits of these emerging technologies are too important to ignore. With that in mind, this chapter reviews the current state of research and real-world practice of optimisation techniques and artificial intelligence in risk reduction in this field. It also examines related promising techniques and their future potential.

Microperimetry in Children’s Practice

Child health is a global health priority. The program “Elimination of Eliminable Blindness in the World of Vision-2020” gives the fourth place to the problems of pediatric ophthalmopathology and creates targeted programs for their elimination. The introduction of modern equipment in the clinical practice of pediatric ophthalmologists has expanded the boundaries of traditional diagnostics. Microperimetry is an innovative, quantitative, non-invasive diagnostic study aimed at assessing the functional ability of the retina in strict correlation with morphology. Along with the assessment of light sensitivity, the device allows you to measure fixation parameters, which serves as a reliable criterion for its stability and indirectly reflects the functional organization of central vision. In this regard, the literature review presents the results of domestic and foreign researchers who used microperimetric testing as the main or additional research method for diseases of various etiologies, such as hereditary retinal diseases, amblyopia, and nystagmus. Most authors have demonstrated the high diagnostic significance of this method, the ability to assess photosensitivity of the retina, the detection of fixation disorders, such as eccentricity and instability, even in pediatric patients. The use of microperimetry as a new method of treatment for these diseases has also been shown. Visual rehabilitation based on biofeedback provided by this device has shown high efficiency in diseases of the central region. More research remains to be done to determine future potential applications of this technology, in particular in pediatric practice, and to develop the potential of microperimetry as a tool for the visual rehabilitation of patients.

Application of thermal analysis in ferrous and nonferrous foundries

This paper is devoted to the memory of Professor Ljubomir Nedeljkovic (1933-2020), Head of the Department of Iron and Steel Metallurgy University of Belgrade, Serbia. Assessment of the melt quality is one of the most important casting process parameters, which allowed sound production of intricated cast parts. At the present time, various devices have been applied at foundry floors to control melt quality. Thermal analysis is one of them, widely used for melt quality control in ferrous and non-ferrous casting plants. During solidification, metal and alloys released latent heat, which magnitude is dependent on the type of phases that form during the solidification process. Plotting temperature versus time data during solidification provides useful information related to the actual solidification process. The applied technique is called thermal analysis, whereas the cooling curve is the name of such a plot. The main aim of this paper is to give a short overview of the present thermal analysis application in various foundries and to indicate the future potential use of this technique.